It takes love. A rare and irresistible love that makes you want only to ski and ski and ski, faster and steeper and better, from the earliest gray- white light of Saturday until the falling-dark dusk of Sunday, when at last you have to go home. Until one Sunday night you do not go home at all. On that Monday morning, and every morn i ng after that, you go skiing. And you stay skiing It also takes dedication The kind of dedication that allows you to make martinis and snow and omelets and beds for other people, if in between you can only spend your time skiing. It also takes a slightly mystical gift. The gift of causing a pair of skis to respond to your thoughts. Not to your flexing muscles or to your shifting weight, but to your thoughts. You learn that you can do it one morning when you're out making nice wide swings down the face of the mountain. As you go s-s-s-s-sssssssing past a tidy little stand of blue spruce, you spot a fresh slope of very deep crystaJly powder, clean and untracked, way over there; you think "I want to be there" and with the thought you are there. The skis take you there and rush you through that point of space and time WHOOSH and into the next. And just at that moment nobody could blame you for feeling a little bit like the King of the Snow People. Now perhaps any carefully made implements for sliding on snow ca n do that for you. Perha ps just any assembl ies of plastic and steel and wood. And perhaps not. Perhaps you have to have a pair of Head Skis. Just ask any ski bum what it takes. HEAD SKI COMPANY. INC. Tlmonlum. Maryland 21093 Head Skis sell for around: JR-60,$75; JR-90, $95; STD,$1l5; Shortski, $115; DP, $115; 320, $145; 360, $165; SL.$170; GS, $175; DH, $185.